I’ll start with what Mr. Goldstein said about making a web site accessible. He said: “It’s pretty easy to resolve most of these barriers [to access]” and “the expense is usually small.” His examples of common problems including things like failure to properly use the “H1 tag” or to write code that properly moves the “focus” of a web page. “Pretty easy” and “small expense” are words whose meaning depends on the business involved. This blog was set up by myself using a WordPress template. I didn’t write any code, and I couldn’t find an “H1 tag” to save my life. I do know, because a web programmer helped me look at it, that this single page is created by about 1000 lines of computer code. If that code is wrong, fixing it would not be “pretty easy” for me or any of the tens of thousands of small businesses that use WordPress or similar template based web design tools. More

I hate scare mongering lawyers, but it looks like the risk that a business will be sued under the ADA based on web accessibility has dramatically increased over the last few months. Web access lawsuits may be one of the most important kinds of ADA litigation in 2016. This is not because of any change in the law, which remains largely unchanged and undeveloped. It is instead because of a change in plaintiff’s lawyers. Since this summer Carlson Lynch Sweet & Kipela, a Pennsylvania law firm with a very active ADA litigation practice, has filed at least eleven new lawsuits alleging ADA violations based on web accessibility. The defendants are primarily national retailers or restauranteurs: Footlocker, Sears, Toys-R-Us, Brooks Brothers, Pep Boys, and Hard Rock Cafe among others. Following these lawsuits Carlson Lynch has apparently sent dozens, if not hundreds of demand letters to retailers all over the country offering to settle supposed ADA web access claims. My clients in different states have received such letters, and I’m sure they are only a small sampling of the total sent. It remains to be seen how aggressively Carlson Lynch will follow up these demand letters, but they will certainly serve as an example to other law firms who represent ADA plaintiffs, so a wave of such demands and possibly lawsuits can be expected. More